In the field of road surface repair it is often necessary or desirable to repair cracks and potholes as they appear. The repair generally consists of applying some type of hot asphalt or asphalt product to the cracks and potholes. To apply the hot asphalt to a road surface requires a fairly large (approximately four tons) trailer towed heating and application machine. The machine melts bulk blocks or bags of the asphalt material into a semi-fluid by raising the temperature of the bulk material to approximately 425° F. to 450° F. The semi-fluid material is then applied to the road surface where needed through a manually operated application wand via a high pressure pump. The semi-fluid material will remain hot and sticky to the touch for some time and the road cannot be open to traffic until the semi-fluid material is adequately cooled.
Cold patch materials are available and will fill potholes and large cracks but cannot be used effectively on small cracks, small or shallow holes, or on concrete. Adhesion of this material is poor and never, ever, water tight on any hole whether small or large.
While hot applied rubberized asphalt will fill a pothole (small or large) with an absolute water tight seal, the drawbacks are the closure of the lane being repaired to traffic and the required equipment and man hours. There is also a loss of road surface friction in cooler temperatures as there is no aggregate contacting tire surfaces.
While surface friction loss is not mentionable with cold patch materials with aggregates, these materials are unable to make a watertight bond with the existing road material. With no water tight seal, a conventionally patched pothole is doomed to failure from the start. Further, while it fails, it also allows and facilitates continued degradation of surrounding road surface and subsurface material. Another shortcoming in the use of cold patch material is the required diligence and planning on the part of the labor factor to determine, shape, and place just the right amount of over-fill in the pothole so that when fully compacted by traffic the pothole patch and the road surface are the same level.
Lack of diligence by workers or inability to compute compaction ratios mentally will result in—what was a pothole in the road, is now a bump in the road. If the workers use too little cold patch material in a pothole, they will create an even less desired effect, i.e., a shallow spot on the road surface. The shallow spot is a place for water to pool in as it seeps through the non-water tight seam, where it degrades the subsurface, which then further degrades the original road surface.
Also, with current cold patch materials, it is so unlikely to effect a successful patch on a very small or just-starting hole that such attempts are seldom even made. Small cracks and potholes will generally bring the same response from the more senior work crew members to the new trainees, “That's not really big enough yet. Just let it grow.” A safe thing to say since no maintenance supervisor is likely to criticize crew members for not attempting such patches, as their effectiveness-to-labor cost ratio is so well understood by all. No supervisor is likely to send a crew to do a section of road where there is just a few small holes. Labor cost-to-work completed is simply not justified, so they wait for a more labor cost/work done ratio to appear. Basically neglecting the road until adequately degraded.
It would be highly advantageous, therefore, to remedy the foregoing and other deficiencies inherent in the prior art.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide new and improved road surface maintenance material forms and formation.
It is another object of the present invention to provide new and improved road surface maintenance material forms that are useful in a large variety of maintenance\repair applications and conditions.
It is another object of the present invention to provide new and improved road surface maintenance material forms that are useful in the repair of different sized and shaped road surface faults.